


romance

by ruruka



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-02 13:32:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20276707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Summary: a lovestory about yagami light.post canon white chocolate roses oneshot.





	romance

**Author's Note:**

> firstly if you have not read [white chocolate roses](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18499651/chapters/43838245) this piece will not mean much. so. i recommend that.  
for everyone else. hi. i debated writing this for a long time as i didn't want to ruin the original story and its level of ambiguity as a stand alone piece, however i ultimately felt like it's been long enough to where this is an appropriate piece to add onto it. wcr is my favorite work i have ever written and it is very dear to me and recently i've noticed a lot of people feel similarly, even if they halfway hate it for devastating them the way it did (lol) i have still gotten some of the most meaningful feedback for it and i appreciate it to no end.  
for people struggling with the ending the same way light did maybe this will help you out.
> 
> thank you so much for everything.

His hands do not shake as he draws within them scalpels or tubing. They’d steadied as the new year rolled over top him, though January is still horrendous, and, too, on February’s last day, he ignores every phone call, because none of them could possibly be the person he wants to spend his thirtieth birthday with.

March first is a Saturday. Light cannot pinpoint just exactly when, in the last three months, that he’d started waking up without the gnawing throb behind his eyes just to quell them in a stumble of face to palms and lungs on fire, but he thinks it’s just recently that he’d gotten through his very first day without crying. That had felt a certain accomplishment. Then he’d reached for the crimped edge of yellow notebook paper beneath the opposite pillow, and that had been the end of that. 

He feels embarrassed for it, mostly. Never has he been the type, he and his taut jaw and impressive resume, to feel a moment clench him so fiercely as to wet the eyes, raw the throat in screams for only the thick wrinkles in his sheets to muffle (though that sort of intensity had careened away as time went on, and as time went on, Light would less so sob himself sick as he would merely have to swallow a few extra times while speaking to a cardiomyopathy patient). Light has never been a crier, not especially the kind to show his emotions at any level of freedom, but perhaps when L Lawliet came in and out of his life like a faceless gust through a stained glass revolving door, perhaps something in him had been changed just a bit.

In January and February (not in December, never in December, December had been a month Light swears he doesn’t remember a single second of, not the Christmas that hadn’t existed or the very first snowfall he’d closed his curtains over), his office door would so often gain the taps of timid knuckles, and Misa would always be the sunshine roaming through the window to ask him to join her for lunch. The first time he nodded it onward, it was February sixteenth, and Misa and Nori seated in his consultation chairs sharing a bento and the intermittent fleeting brush of hands beneath the desk had almost twitched a smile across his face.

But March first is a Saturday, one too cold again to bike past the river and throw the felt around, though he does on brief occasion wonder what became of the weekend stranger the same way he wonders about everyone who’s ever passed through his life. The front windows rest closed with the curtains sheer along them, houseclothes just as much his comfort as the hour old coffee spinning on the microwave tray. He tends to forget things like that, like coffee sitting on the side table as he films his very own pictureshow in staring at the white of the walls. He always has.

Away from the glance behind him, where paws click idly along the kitchen tile just to follow him, he’s drawn toward the machine’s zero second alarm, quells the beep with a push of the door open. And just maybe he’s caught up in thinking about the solicitous brown eyes he’d just met, or with the dark, sulking indigo ones pounding against his mind, but he very normally wouldn’t stick his bare palm against the ceramic of the mug he shouldn’t have allowed in the microwave to begin with, but at the least he’s able to jerk his hand quick enough back to do more damage in spilling coffee on the tray than to his skin. At least.

He blinks at the mug in its off center position, the black brew building a moat around its base, and closes the door over all of it. Sayu can deal with it in the morning. 

As if the malice of his thought’s been heard, his drinkless path back to the living room cuts through the center the apothecary table rattling. Light lifts the call up into his hand, mouth taut to imagine a voice strong enough to greet hello. Though when he does, she’s all over him, conversation swept up into her lungs and bleating smile he can feel against his ear from the miles away. “It’ll be amazing,” Sayu promises, “Come with me, please? _ Pleeeease-” _

Because twenty somethings (now that he’s a thirty nothing he can really say that, can really truly dig into the kids these days) know not the flawless beauty of a night alone, he lays his phone away with the new task to look in the mirror without leaning forward to vomit, and he’s showered and primped and down the porch at seven of the clock that evening, tells Cheeseburger to be a good boy before closing the door between them. In the front seat of his car, he simmers in the silence of memories, none of which he can recall, recent, leading him from his driveway to anywhere but the executive parking lot of the hospital, and he does not look left the whole ride through.

He’s noticed, once he pulls to the curb he’s never seen, that young people just aren’t blunt enough anymore, the poster child being his sister who’d called him three hours ago and hitched him to the idea of hanging out tonight, address thrown at him once the call ended. But she’d never called it a barroom. Perhaps, if she had, that would have tingled him more eager to agree. 

Time rests endless upon his shoulders, but if he must guess, he sits at the counter a rough fifteen minutes, nursing blandly one single scotch with the thought of driving home on his mind still, before his phone rings for the second time that day, for the second time reading the same contact name.

“I’m so, so, _ sooo _ sorry,” she mourns beneath the throbbing ambiance of the room around him. “I completely forgot Dad asked me to help out with his business dinner. A bunch of stuffed shirts are coming over, I’m supposed to help Mom cook and clean up after. You can forgive me, can’t you?”

Someday. Light allows her free of his hook, brushing away the sycophantic crest of apologies to slip his phone into his breast pocket, resting weight in his elbows as he leans forward on the bar counter, sipping the last ounce from his sweating glass. In the back of his mind, maybe the section so far back it’s left his skull entirely, he knows she hadn’t forgotten about the prior plans, not for one moment.

With a shove he’s gone from his place, some handful of money left behind, breathing cold through his nose where all else burns. His look is kempt as he turns, ironed and polished, turns to leave the smell of amber and absinthe behind him; it’s a wooden little place, wicker chairs and clean edged counters, expanding only so far as he could walk round once before seeing it all. When he turns, he does see it all, huddled off against a corner where several chairs have been pulled to bite on laughter more raucous as the hours should deepen. Something catches his eye about the one man nearest him. Something being everything about the way he’s pulled himself up to crouch in his seat, the way the lighting tells no truths and the lengths of his dark hair have obscured enough of his face to make certain only a strong boned nose and a half smirking look, and when it matches toward Light, glances to the stare he’s held as many minutes as he cannot count, Light decides he knows exactly which valve has stalled in his heart, and knows that today is March first, a Saturday. 

The man’s thin eyes do not blink as they rest upon him, and in another life Light would wander closer, might have in this one if the stranger hadn’t been caught again into the circle of conversation and laughed his teeth into a clink on the rim of his glass. 

Light sees L in the bar that night, and again in the grocery store the following week, hunched forward to deliberate over the ripeness of the bananas in either long fingered hand, though Light had been certain once the man moved on to glance through the bundles of kale that he was mistaken; another time, a minute in early January he’ll never forget, he’d gotten so close to the pale lanky stranger on the metro, when the snowbanks towered too high to drive cross the city, that he’d felt his breath in his very hands, had bent there from where he gripped the hazard handle to look the man right in the eyes, and the man had blinked at him, had flattened himself back against the windows and begged him to keep his distance. But he was there, and he was free, and he was loved, and so had been the men at the bar and the grocery store, the one in the corner market with the nudie mag pulled up over his nose, the checkout clerk on a drizzling weekday night who’d lifted the bag of dog treats up in two pinched fingertips, the passerby on the sidewalk, the one beside him in rushhour traffic, the patient who Light meets for the first time on a Thursday and listens to complain about the burnt garbage that is the hospital cafeteria coffee, and, when Light clocks in again on Sunday, has already been discharged. 

That Sunday, sometime in the midst of March, Light falls asleep with his dog on his legs, water stains down his porcelain face back into the finest brunet above the ears, and yellow paper clutched close upon his chest.

Nothing hurts so badly, he thinks, as eternity. 

Epiphanies tend to grate him that way when the office door is locked and the desk leaves its hard impression against his lain forehead, resting there with hands within his own hair, not an everyday routine but an urge that hits him, from time to time, to just collapse, to be weightless. He lays with his head on his desk and does not cry, perhaps nothing inside left to leak, and when he goes home again at dusk, the camellias wilting in the cold outside are the last straw upon his scotch taped spine.

He sees L on the train and the sidewalk and at the corner store, and when Light locks the door behind him to wash up to his wrists in the bathroom sink, he sees L in his very own eyes, the dark shadows beneath them, the film of passion around either iris that fights every second of the day. Light only blinks when his eyes burn as badly as his heart, the image in the mirror beside him vanishing as his lids part again, and that suffocates him in a way he has yet to ever know.

But it’s alright. It’s alright because L isn’t gone there, in fact, he’s waiting for him, when Light walks in drags to his bedroom and sits on the folded comforter edge, and L kneels before him, cups Light’s face in his hands, and kisses all the ache right up from him.

“Well...talk to me,” L says, once they can draw from each other, Light resting with both hands grasping upon the other’s wrists, bones sharp, not a whisper of plastic or needle tip memories, free and clean and healthy right in front of his lover. “What’s on your mind?”

His bottom lip drops itself just a touch, enough to breathe through, trembling only a moment before he finds himself and he says, “You,” and he tells him, “_You, _L, how is that even a question? You’re the only thing I can think about.”

He’s certain, sitting there with L breathing against him, weighing him in place, that there’s a smile in the eyes that stare forward, some subtle sense of longing hidden underneath all the forgiveness, and his thumbs rub the most gentle circles against Light’s face as he whispers, “Why’s that?”

If Light should move, his heart stops to think the heat upon him will be stolen away again, so he’s cement sitting there, poured into the mold of what he’s become. He does not move, does not dare even a swallow down the burn of his throat. “Because…” fools itself into thinking it’ll be spoken cleanly, quavers out instead into a hitch that turns his voice high and hollow, “I miss you, L.” Then, there, Light does move, must comply to where the moment forces him, frozen so much as he can be when his jawline tightens to stone and eyelids tense to support the abrasive weight of agony. “...I never even got to tell you I love you.”

Rather than their circles, L moves the pad of his thumb, the grooves of his very identity rough against his panting skin, center throbbing with his every pulse that Light can _ feel _right there on his face as L, with one thumb, moves to brush the wet from his eyes. And he knows he hasn’t confused him for someone else, he knows he’s his L when he smiles there in front of him, a deep etched grin that asks him in a near silent breath, “Did you?”

“Yes,” Light chokes out, gripping twice as hard upon the wrists in his hands, willing them never again to go, “I still do.”

L softens his stare, a subtle fraction more golden just the same as his voice. “Then you’ve done more for me than the majority of people in my life.” A finger lifts to hush a strand of hair from Light’s face. “And...you didn’t have to tell me, anyway. I’m sure you remember, I’m a detective.”

The way Light laughs there could very well be the first all year. Behind him, behind _ them, _the broad windows of his bedroom do not gleam so much as they bathe them both in the gilded light of sunset, as if a hand that bundles them together as one single halo of earnesty, together. L’s voice sits on his ears like a breath, nothing like the way it has every hour of the last months, and exactly how it’s always haunted him the same as the off times he’ll be lain in bed to pretend the pillowcase smells like home. Of course, of course he remembers. 

“Don’t forget about me,” Light lets sound as violently desperate as his soul needs it to, able to be vulnerable just one moment, just one fleeting, perfect moment. “_Please."_

The hands on his face squeeze just once.

“Don’t be stupid, Light,” L demands of him yet still speaks the way the shorelines do. “It’d be very close to impossible to forget the person who saved my life.”

Light doesn’t want to blink. He doesn’t. Not until he’s so taken by the sudden thumping on his bedroom door that he’s thrown right to his feet, a stagger, and with wild eyes and pulsing heart does he stare forward as the door perks itself open enough to allow the entrance of a snuffling wet nose.

“Boof,” Cheeseburger says to him. Light blinks.

Reality likes to hit him sometimes as a pat on the shoulder, and sometimes, as a hammer aimed for the sensitive bit of his cranial bone.

Every so often, he’ll be reminded of what he once had, on times when he’ll glance through the big window on the first floor entry unit and through the courtyard soil he can count the tulips asking if yet they may greet the world. Indicators like that, and like the first morning all year he feels it suitable to let his sunroof glass be swallowed, remind him how warm it’s grown. And by May, one of her later days, the sunroof sits open as he drives to work, breeze floating against his face, and that same morning is the first time Light can remember singing in the car again. 

Nothing special, nothing stage worthy. He’d kept the radio on as his driving partner the past few days unlike those all preceding, playing today something that’s been done to death on every station in the promise to make it the summer’s top hit. Were he at a stoplight, he’d have changed it, though instead finds his throat humming with it, all the way to his voice crooning out alongside the words. That’s the first morning Light sings in his car again. And that’s the first morning he can stand to see the sun glint off the face of his watch.

“Good morning, doctor,” Nori greets when he fits aside the front desk, fingertip flirting through a file of today’s needs already readied for him. “Busy day today, huh?”

Vaguely his eyes scan the scheduling sheet, nodding toward her. “Yes, but that’s nothing new.” Beneath his nose, the folder closes, intaking a breath of the new day’s air as he looks forward for her eyes to catch. “I’ll be alright.”

For the first time, right there, he believes himself, that he’ll be alright and the flowers will continue to bloom, autumn will come and go and December will hurt, but just the same do the seasons roll upon him like an ocean that once every few tides will scrape seaglass down a scar, and then he’ll remember what it means at all to be alive and to feel. He has his passion, he has his life, he has every memory and every moment that consists of them, he has his house and the river that babbles in the mornings, the tennis court down the end, he has the gardens that match his lattice front porch, his sister’s smile and the tulips in the courtyard, and he’s got the crumpled little Polaroid in his wallet sleeve that he’ll glance at from time to time to time and remember all over again that gnawing pain that signals life, reminding him healing comes only from something at all to heal from, and he’s got himself, Yagami Light, head cardiologist and perhaps sometimes an impeccable specialist on the heart.

And forever, endlessly, he has his L.


End file.
